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Food Dictionary Needed!


Mark Slater

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What's wrong with "please"?

"Foodie" is trendie, yes, but give us a better one that conveys a love for, even obsession with food, without being pretensious or furrin' ... [he says, thinking of "gourmand" ... ]

"Foodie" sounds like "groupie" or "trekkie" -- shallow, trendy and slightly ditzy. Sounds like someone who watches a lot of Rachel Re. It's odious and, of the many derogatory terms that have and/or should be flung my way, I prefer almost all of them to being labled a "foodie."

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Yummy.
Or worse, "yum-o!"

Hear hear to the "sourcing" cranks. Is it used in any other context than food? I'm going to start telling people that I "sourced" my shoes at Nordstrom. :P

(Waitman, "foodie" and "Trekkie", agreed, but "groupie" is a specific and almost honorable profession. :D Surely you've seen Almost Famous?)

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Hear hear to the "sourcing" cranks. Is it used in any other context than food? I'm going to start telling people that I "sourced" my shoes at Nordstrom. :P
Yes, the "supply chain management" logistics-types seem to breathe this stuff. Just say that Nordstrom is one of your preferred vendors...

The first time I saw the word “sourcing” I flashed on a scene from the movie “All the President’s Men” when the Ben Bradley insisted that Woodward and Bernstein needed to go out and find another source before he would publish their Watergate story. I just assumed “sourcing” was a journalism term of art for the act of getting a source for their article.

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Grammar and mechanics issues lead to people getting the actual names of restaurants and chefs wrong. A few examples:

Dean Gold's restaurant is named Dino, not Dino's.

Wrong: "We ate at Dino's last night"

Right: "We ate at Dino last night"

Also right: "We love Dino's wine list"

The chef at Corduroy is Tom Power, not Tom Powers.

Wrong: We love Tom Powers' soups and scallops

Alternate wrong: We love Tom Powers soups and scallops

Right: We love Tom Power's soups and scallops

Nothing chips away at a writer's credibility like poor grammar mixed with unsure nomenclature, which I believe is what Slater was getting at in his original post.

I predict a sea change in the use of apostrophes [not apostrophe's] coming. Actually, it's already started (see the Dino example): people don't like to see a singular word that ends in a vowel made plural - it looks odd - so they add an apostrophe to separate the offending vowel from the s. Examples:

"At the track last week we saw lots of Fords (right), Saabs (right), Chevy's (wrong), Porsche's (very wrong), Ferrari's (wrong) and Lotus's (oh so wrong, and I blame the Washington Post style book)."

Oh, and a big FUCK YOU to Invision for confusing my correct use of brackets in the sentence above with BBCode, forcing me to change said brackets to parentheses in order to submit the edited post. :P

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Everyone shouyld read Dave Sedaris's (is this proper apostrophe use?) essay "Today's Special" in the book Me Talk Pretty One Day. it's about the challenges he faces dining in New York:

"...where the world's brightest young talents come to braise carmelized racks of songbirds or offer up their famous knuckle of flash-seared crappie served with a collar of chided ginger and cornered by a tribe of kiln-roasted Chilean toadstools, teased with a warm spray of clarified musk oil. Even when they promise something simple, thy've got to tart it up- the meatloaf has been poached in seawater, or there are figs in the tuna salad. If cooking is an art, we're in our Dada phase."

He goes on and on about "...skirt steak with a medley of suffocated peaches, but I'm put off by the aspirin sauce."

It's four short pages of anti-"foodie" hilarity.

PS- There are many "desert" islands- see Cape Verde, Curacao, Bonaire, etc.

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Hear hear to the "sourcing" cranks. Is it used in any other context than food? I'm going to start telling people that I "sourced" my shoes at Nordstrom. :P
Sadly, we use this at work in horrific permutations to refer to "government source contract" stuff. We have a specific list of vendors who have negotiated to be sources for us. If we use them, we don't have to do the regular contracting process which is painful and can take a year. It becomes

We sourced it to/from x.

Who'd you source it to/from?

I can't find a freakin source for x!

We're going to source the species list but draft the plan ourselves.

How'd you get your samples processed so quickly? We sourced them.

I'd happily do without this (both the word and process).

We have many creative types on this board. We could have a contest to come up with an alternative to foodie. Then we all commit to using the new word on this board, blogs, Sietsema's chats, wine columns in the Washingtonian, etc.

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N.B. I found the word "medley" in Gourmet, October 1981, the only issue from that decade that I kept. It was written when editors at the magazine still insisted that the word "tinned" should replace "canned" in copy.

Here's the introduction to a menu for a housewarming:

"The days are crisp with cornflower blue skies. The nights are cool and starry. Frost nips at the pumpkin, but gone is the garden. The seasons have changed.

We, too, have come inside, to celebrate a return to the warmth of hearth and home....Crystal and silver sparkle and tapered candles flicker gently, a fitting setting for an intriguing buffet.

The aromas suggest a menu of the Middle East and the subtleties of the spice routes. Unmysterious, though, are the preparations..."

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We have many creative types on this board. We could have a contest to come up with an alternative to foodie. Then we all commit to using the new word on this board, blogs, Sietsema's chats, wine columns in the Washingtonian, etc.

Foodie needs to be eliminated from the lexicon. It's as if someone held a contest and said "let's dream up the most embarrassingly stupid word we can think of." Gastronaut is clever, but it implies travel so isn't the perfect descriptor. It's also cumbersome to pronounce.

Someone please start a new thread to implement laniloa's idea. If we reach consensus, I'll never use the term foodie again. Who knows - you may become famous!

Cheers,

Rocks.

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Desert island. The island is probably deserted, not a desert.

Now if it were a dessert island, I'd like to visit some day.

My inner pedagogue has awakened. There are MANY desert islands (which may explain why many of them are deserted--no source of fresh water).

ETA: I stupidly wrote this before reading B.A.R.'s comments.

And I just DETEST the use of double possesives; e.g., "She was a friend of Porcupine's." Thank you WaPo. Not.

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description word and I know most pastry chefs will kill me for saying it, and its a word I just don't like the sound of....MOIST.

as for Porcupine'scomments about Dino and Tom Power, I have to say those who refer to us as Tallulah or even better tallulah's. There is no 'h' or 's' in the spelling.

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This thread is about food-related terms, right?

Written on menu:

"Try a slice of our homemade pie, just like Grandma's."

Yeah, homemade can go, to. If something is made at home, it's not served in a restaurant. If something is made in a restaurant kitchen, it is by definition not homemade. Although I know many people consider their restaurant 'home'. And why is everyone's Grandmother such a great cook? I mean, my grandmother was too busy fleeing Cossacks to cook anything.

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description word and I know most pastry chefs will kill me for saying it, and its a word I just don't like the sound of....MOIST.

I second this. MOIST should be removed from the lexicon entirely. In relation to food or anything else. The word just makes me shudder...

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Yeah, homemade can go, to. If something is made at home, it's not served in a restaurant. If something is made in a restaurant kitchen, it is by definition not homemade. Although I know many people consider their restaurant 'home'. And why is everyone's Grandmother such a great cook? I mean, my grandmother was too busy fleeing Cossacks to cook anything.

Considering I spend equal or more time at the restaurant as I do at home, I consider it to be my "home" as well. So homemade or housemade is perfectly acceptable as an adjective modifying all the different things we make at the restaurant as opposed to those that are purchased from an outside vendor.

PS- My grandmothers were badass cooks.

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Yeah, homemade can go, to. If something is made at home, it's not served in a restaurant. If something is made in a restaurant kitchen, it is by definition not homemade. Although I know many people consider their restaurant 'home'. And why is everyone's Grandmother such a great cook? I mean, my grandmother was too busy fleeing Cossacks to cook anything.
Considering I spend equal or more time at the restaurant as I do at home, I consider it to be my "home" as well. So homemade or housemade is perfectly acceptable as an adjective modifying all the different things we make at the restaurant as opposed to those that are purchased from an outside vendor.

PS- My grandmothers were badass cooks.

Though I agreed with MD on the "foodie" thing, I'm agin' him on the homemade. "House-made", the preferred substitute word, seems artificial and bureaucratic. If it's made in the restaurant rather than shipped in from another - commercial -- source, I'm down with homemade.

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Though I agreed with MD on the "foodie" thing, I'm agin' him on the homemade. "House-made", the preferred substitute word, seems artificial and bureaucratic. If it's made in the restaurant rather than shipped in from another - commercial -- source, I'm down with homemade.
Not to parse nips, but isn't that exactly the problem? Taking a word that has a perfectly good and acceptable meaning, and simply giving it another meaning that we like better. Nothing wrong with 'desserts are made in-house', or 'our sausages are made from scratch'.

And BC-exactly! Probably in your genes to become a chef.

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description word and I know most pastry chefs will kill me for saying it, and its a word I just don't like the sound of....MOIST.
But what can be used in its place to describe cakes and similar baked-goods that have a mouth-pleasing abundance of hydration? Wet? Damp? Clammy? Humid? Non-dry? Optimally balanced ratio of liquid to solid? :P
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A pox and beaucoup passive curses upon my Gallic patrimony, and traitor Alexandre Cammas for introducing “Le Fooding” nomenclature into Francophony: an illicit bastardisation of L'oncle Samuel's “Food” et “Feeling.” Good times, perhaps, however, should the burgeoning blossoms of French comasticureanism really be inbred with generic cowboy vernacular?

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Dude. :P Any who choose to use this word do so at their own risk.

Q: Is that a feminist rant brewing on the horizon?

A: A gale warning is in effect. Those in the vicinity should take precautionary actions to ensure their safety.

Dude. Chill. :D

Not long ago I caught the classic western "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" ( summarized here, for you youngsters). As young, easterner, do-gooder Jimmy Stewart's stage coach rides towards the lawless town of Shinbone, an achingly mean Lee Marvin -- as Libert Valance --holds up the stage and when Stewart objects, Marvin kicks the shit out of him while repeatedly calling him "dude." Given current usage of the term, it's a pretty surreal moment and my son, then 17, had no idea what was going on. (Of course, he's also the one who looked at a rotary phone in a junque/antique store and asked "how do you dial that thing?"

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Being a "Foodie" was fine until Jim Leff decided to deride it in an attempt to pimp his site "Chowhound" (a site I actually like even if I can't stand Jim's paticular point of view on this point.)

Sorry, but "foodie" is just a dumb word, pure and simple. Always has been, always will be. There.

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